Shakun Khanna, head, human capital management of APAC at Oracle in an interview spoke to ET about the changing role of technology and HR in securing and nurturing talent.

There will be a time when you could be having a real deep conversation with a bot and not necessarily a human being, said Shakun Khanna.

Technology can help remove heuristics and biases in hiring and help hiring managers and leaders tap into the huge talent pool that is invisible today, said Shakun Khanna, head, human capital management of APAC at Oracle. In an interview to ET’s Rica Bhattacharyya, Khanna spoke about the changing role of technology as well as HR in securing and nurturing talent. Edited excerpts:

What is this concept of ‘invisible talent’? There are three dimensions to the visibility of talent. The first two are where the talent is and what talent means. A Harvard research says about 40% of inward job moves or when people take up new jobs within the organisation, fail. A similar doubledigit number is attributed to the failure when you hire externally. The first reason is managers or hiring leaders do not have visibility of what to look for in talent as the environment is constantly changing. Therefore, the skill sets required are changing. The third dimension is whether organisations have a consolidated view of their own talent because there’s an interesting dichotomy that internally I’m not able to find people, but my people are employable externally. Which means that the external world is able to see something in my employees that I’m internally not able to see.

How is technology helping in identifying invisible talent or finding the right talent from within or outside an organisation? Technology can help in removing heuristics and biases. Technology can be used to go very deep and look from a big data perspective, bringing multiple elements to really do analysis and throw up insights which are not intuitive to human beings. The second is bringing objectivity in assessing people, right from linguistic assessment to facial expression. Various technologies are available — IoT devices are available that can help one make a better decision. The third element is technology can really help us reach out to the right people. We are talking about social networks. Lastly, the solution is to look at internal talent pools. So, the first thing and the best place to get people for an organisation is to look within the ecosystem. And then, of course, as we go along it can also help in building those skills.

How is the role of HR transforming? The technical part of HR is kind of redundant. HR has to change its mindset dramatically. Earlier, they were probably the conscience keepers of the organisation or they were like the police. That’s not going to continue. HR will have to bring in more agility. HR will have to play more role in saying how we can make this person successful within the organisation versus the traditional paradigm of why he or she does not fit into it. That’s the big shift in human resources.

What do you think about the inroads made by bots and artificial intelligence? The mundane tasks will go to them and in the next wave of evolution, they will become more interesting. There will be a time when you could be having a real deep conversation with a bot and not necessarily a human being. And over a period of time, the collective intelligence of artificially driven bots would become higher than the individual experience of a human being.